Toyota to Move Manufacturing Plant

Published 8:00 pm, Thursday, January 3, 2002

Toyota Motor Corp. plans to shift its manufacturing of pickup truck beds from California to an assembly plant it expects to open on the eastern edge of Tijuana in 2004, company officials said Friday.

The Japanese automaker plans to continue producing other components at its plant in Long Beach, Calif., which employs 540 people. It does not anticipate layoffs there as a result of the new factory in Mexico, the company said.

"The Long Beach plant is still very much a part of our long-term future," said Dennis Cuneo, senior vice president for Toyota Motor Manufacturing North America Inc.

The automaker plans to produce about 160,000 beds annually for its Tacoma pickups that will be shipped by truck to Fremont, Calif., for final assembly at New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., a plant the company operates in a joint venture with General Motors Corp.

Toyota has acquired a 700-acre site in Tijuana, which is far more space than it needs to produce the steel pickup beds. The company has not decided where it will build its next full assembly plant in North America, but officials acknowledged that such a plant may be built at the site, which is just south of the U.S.-Mexico border.

"We tend to start small. If we're successful we often expand," Cuneo said.

Company officials said the Tijuana plant was part of its goal of increasing its presence in the North American market. Toyota plans to begin selling cars in Mexico this spring.

The company hasn't formalized the details of the new plant, including the size of its investment or the number of workers it expects to hire. The details will be announced later this year, Cuneo said.

Manufacturers have congregated along the southern side of the U.S.-Mexico border in order to have access to a lower-cost labor force and still be close enough to ship partially finished goods north to meet just-in-time production requirements.